


Corundum and Ourania

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 20:59:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7377184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These are two separate fics that I chose to post together. Corundum was written in response to a prompt requesting Mulder shopping for a gift for Scully. Ourania was written as a follow-up and was inspired by the Gift prompt in @leiascully's writing challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Corundum and Ourania

Herschel has a jeweler’s loupe against his eye when Mulder comes in. He’s one of those old Diamond District guys who got lost en route to grab a pumpernickel bagel or the perfect slice, somehow winding up in Old Town Alexandria.

He puts the loupe down, beckoning Mulder closer. “What, your watch is giving you fits again? You should get something tougher with what you do to that Omega. I gotta Rolex you could take to the Mariana Trench, a metsieh fun a ganef. Lemme see what you did.”

Mulder holds his wrist up. “Still ticking. I’m here for, uh, a friend, actually.”  


Herschel looks sly. “Pretty friend?”

He shifts like a schoolboy shopping for a corsage. “She can beat me up, so I’ll say yes.”  


He approaches the counter, staring down at the glittering array. He’s had a vague notion of buying something shiny for Scully for a while now, some sparkling thing she’d never get for herself. His inheritance usually funds items outside his normal budget, for reluctant informants and Antarctic charter flights. Scully, however, has become his favorite luxury indulgence. He treats her to overpriced sushi and upgrades them to business class, all the while feeling luckier than Henry Weems.

“What size ring she wears, your shaineh maidel?”

Mulder’s mouth falls open. “Oh…no. No, not that kind of thing. No. Ha, no, I was thinking more like….” He trails off. “I don’t know, actually.”

Herschel squints, considering. “How much you’re wanting to spend?”

Mulder sighs. Like many people brought up with money, he has no idea how much things are supposed to cost. He just knows the ironclad maxim: “never touch the principal.”  He pays a hundred bucks for a tie and clips coupons for his Pop Tarts. His bank account dwindles with an abandon that horrifies Scully because he’d never been taught to budget. He’d squirmed and fidgeted when she tried to explain his 401(k) to him, because his parents “had a guy” he’d inherited along with the money.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Let’s just figure out what I want first.”

Herschel considers this, stroking his tidy beard. “Necklace is always good. Maybe like this?” He points at a diamond circle on a yellow gold chain.

Mulder imagines it suspended beneath her delicate collarbones, his breath raising the fine hairs at the back of her neck when he clasps it there. But her cross is such a part of her that he reluctantly sets the idea aside. “She already has a necklace,” Mulder replies.

“She has one necklace and you don’t think she wants more? You take her out for some dinner, some wine. Maybe she likes to have another one for that, you shlemiel.”

Mulder shakes his head. “She likes that one.”

Herschel sighs, pained. “She likes that _one_. Bracelet?”

“No, she works where I do. Bracelets get in the way. She’d lose it.” As he says this, Mulder realizes he wants something she can wear to work. Something that catches the light and sparkles against her severe tailoring, the cool professionalism of her workaday face. He wants something bright in Skinner’s office and the endless budget meetings.  He wants Kimberly and Holly to notice and whisper. “Earrings,” he decides. “I want to get her earrings.”

Herschel lights up. “Okay! So earrings I could show you all day. I think she’s not very girly-girl, your friend, yeah?”

“Not very, no.”

“She wears suits like you?”

 _She wears suits,_ he thinks _, but not like me. She wears them with an impossibly narrow waist and heels that could found a major world religion. She wears them with skirts so tailored you could weep, with a shoulder holster that has figured into my fantasies, and button down shirts I want to open with my teeth._

“Yeah,” he says. “She wears suits.”

“So we skip the fancy-shmancy stuff. Solitaires for this lady, I’m thinking.”

Herschel pulls out a couple of trays with dozens of earrings displayed against white velvet. “Diamonds, always a classic.” He gestures towards rows of diamond earrings, set in platinum and sterling, in white and yellow gold.

Mulder runs a finger under his collar. Diamonds feel fraught with more meaning than either of them are ready for. “Maybe….uh. Maybe not diamond solitaires.”

Herschel rolls his eyes. “So you’re afraid of commitment. Okay, when is her birthday?”

“Uh, February.”

“February is amethysts. She likes purple?”

Mulder considers this. “Her hair is red. I think it might look weird.”

“I had a redheaded girlfriend once. She danced at Radio City, legs for days. You keep a redheaded girl,” he says sternly.

Mulder grins. “I’m doing my best. Hey, what about sapphires? Her eyes are blue.”

“Sapphires, that’s good.” He points. “You’ll look, you’ll tell me.”

Mulder stares at them, rows of different cuts and sizes. What will she make of this? Not terribly sentimental, Scully, but even she’s likely to be taken aback. He knows Napoleon proposed to Josephine with a sapphire, that Princess Diana got one too. He recalls that rubies are a subspecies borne of some trace impurity that Scully can tell him about, the periodic table a storybook in her clever mouth.

A pair catches his eye, oval stones wrapped in a thin ring of diamonds. “Those,” he says, pointing, afraid of getting his fingerprints on them.  _Pave set_ , Herschel tells him, and Mulder repeats it like a password. “Those are the ones.”

“You want me to tell you how much?”

Mulder envisions them in her earlobes, peeping through her hair like a glimpse of sky between the autumn leaves. “Just wrap them up, please,” he replies.

Herschel winks at him and puts the earrings in a small velvet box. He makes a parcel of tissue paper and a gift bag. “You tell her to come here so I can clean them for her, nu? No charge of course.”

Mulder pays him. “You just want to see her hair and dazzle her with your wares.”

“An alter cocker like me taking your girlfriend? I should be so lucky. You paid in cash, she don’t want me. Go on, Agent Mulder. Go give your shaineh maidel these, she thanks you for a night or two, you come back and you thank me with buying a nicer watch next time. Rolex Submariner, they’ll bury you in it.”

The men shake hands. Mulder takes the bag from the counter, thinking it ought to be heavier. The sidewalk is busy with people when he steps onto it, the world a blur of color and noise. He thinks of the Star of India, the star on his shoulder, the star on Scully’s belly. He plans to press his hand to it tonight and tell her it is the sun around which he orbits.  


***

Scully’s at the sink, transferring pasta to a colander when he arrives. Steam billows about her face making her look dewy, curling the little tendrils of hair by her ears. She despises them and so he loves them to be contrary. She wears tight black running pants and her FBI sweatshirt and he thinks she could easily be mistaken for a trainee. He smiles inwardly at the fury this would cause her.

“You ditched me at lunch and now you’re wandering by for dinner?” She rinses the spaghetti in warm water before turning her attention to a pile of vegetables.

He takes a seat at the kitchen table, staring at her ass without pretext. “Hello dear, how was your day?” 

“Don’t be cute, Mulder. I just had the knives sharpened and I’d love to test them on something a little denser than a carrot.” She whacks the tops off the bunch, to illustrate.

He holds up the bag from Herschel. “I got you a little something.”

“Is it the sandwich you promised me six hours ago?”

Mulder opens the bag, sniffs. “On second thought, you might not want it.”

Scully sighs, exasperated and curious. “What is it?”

He pats his thighs. “Come sit on Santa’s lap, little girl.”

She stares at him with a mixture of pity and contempt.

“No?” He pulls the black velvet box out. “Then maybe I’ll give this to some other deserving lass.”

Scully’s eyes are wide. She’s staring at the box like it’s a grenade with a pulled pin. “Mulder,” she squeaks.

“It’s not a ring,” he says hastily, and sees the tension leave her.

“Thank god.”

Mulder assumes a wounded air. “Though you could act a little less relieved.”

She throws a dishtowel at his head, then comes closer. “Mulder, if this is that pair of alien implant earrings you promised, we’re going to have to reevaluate your sleeping arrangements.”

He makes as if to grab the box, but she snatches it away, clutching it to her chest. “Mine!” she says, triumphant.

Scully holds the box in front of her and he is suddenly shy. It’s not a ring, no, but the potential is there for it to be a ring one day. Is that where this is going? Scully in some Disney princess confection, her hair piled up like a Gibson Girl?  His stomach lurches.

“Open it,” he mumbles, kicking a chair leg.

Scully is trying to peer into the box while simultaneously staring at him. She finally gives up and drops her gaze. “Oh, Mulder,” she breathes. “Oh, wow.” She sinks into the chair across from him.

“Yeah?”

Her eyes flick between the earrings and his face. “These are beautiful. But so extravagant…” she looks uncomfortable.

He’d been afraid of this and feigns an airy laugh. “Oh, you thought they were real? No, these are the kind from a lab.”

Wordlessly, she passes him a tiny card from the GIA.

“Oh,” he says weakly. “What a prankster that Herschel is, ha ha.”

Scully has a strange look on her face and Mulder realizes it is the look of someone who is happy enough to cry. Panic sets in. “Hey, you have to try them on!” 

He takes the box from her hands and wrangles the earrings out. Scully watches, bemused. He manages to jab the post through the piercing, thinking of the odd barbarism of punching holes in one’s body from which to display shiny rocks. “There,” he says, screwing the backing on.

“I’ll get the other,” she says faintly, and takes it from him. Mulder marvels at the kinds of intricate tasks women can perform without looking.

“How do they look?”

They are darker than her eyes, but the blue has the same rich, bottomless quality. The oval shape mirrors her pale Madonna face, and the pave diamonds are luminous against the canvas of her skin. Her lovelocks, her bare face and creamy throat put him in mind of Simonetta Vespucci in all those Renaissance paintings. “Wow,” he says, impressed with his taste and her beauty. “I did pretty good.”

Scully grins, blushing, and fishes a small compact from her bag. She admires her reflection for a moment, pressing a slim finger to the stones. “Thank you,” she says, her eyes meeting his in the glass. “They’re beautiful. I've….I’ve never had jewelry like this.” There is a catch in her voice.

He leans forward to run his fingers through her hair while he murmurs into her ear, voice low in his throat. “I’ve been saying the sky was falling for years, Scully. Thought I finally owed you a couple pieces of it.”


End file.
